Collective Social Entrepreneurship: Arenas for Gendering Social Innovation and Marginalized Women’s Collective Action

This chapter focuses on collective(s) and social entrepreneurship and explores how gendering social innovation through marginalized women’s collective actions might add depth and new insight to our understanding of social innovation. We explore different forms of organizations and collectives amongst women in Denmark and India and discuss how these initiatives respond to challenges of gender, inequity, and poverty in this context of multiple marginalities. This approach accentuates how women’s collectives as hybrid organizations can be possible spaces for empowerment, for expanding womens’ agencies and actions, for the creation of social values through production of welfare services or products via market dynamics through collective action, and for co–creation and co-production of citizenship, environment and livelihood. We picture the chosen organizational entities as hybrid and as possible arenas for participation, negotiation of patriarchy in day-to-day lives and spaces for combating poverty, resource deprivation and exclusion. Our theoretical framing situates a discussion of innovation terms like collective action innovation, social action, social innovation linked to a gendered discussion of how marginalized women’s collectives associated with marginalities, gender, intersectionality and exclusion is positioned within this paradigm.